SanDisk, Nikon and Sony Develop 500MB/sec 2TB Flash Card 98
Lucas123 writes "SanDisk, Nikon and Sony are jointly developing a new Compact Flash card specification for the professional photography and video markets that boosts data transfer rates from 167MB/sec with today's 6.0 specification to 500MB/sec. The newly proposed specification would also offer up cards with a theoretical maximum capacity of 2TB, which would be conducive to recording high-definition video."
Please stop being so sensational (Score:5, Insightful)
They didn't DEVELOP anything. They're working on the specification to allow for growth. Nothing more.
Specification (Score:5, Insightful)
Specification... My car's tires are specified to 147mph. *Can* they go that fast?
Wake me up when there is an actual 2TB, 500MB/sec compact flash card out there. I will promptly curse you for requiring me to buy YET ANOTHER compact flash reader.
/. attitude (Score:0, Insightful)
Seriously? Would you rather have 500 different chargers for every cell phone made out there? /. when the first flash memory was announced (not created or produced)- "it's only 4mb, just carry more floppies!", or "a cd can hold 700mb! And it's flat and portable!"
Having a specification is a good first step. I remember the same kind of drivel from
Seriously, you're not the target here. As stated in the summary, *professional* photographers and videographers. You know, people who rely on this shit for a living, instead of some hobby photographing flowers and pets.
Only 2T ? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder how smart it is to design a spec now with the upper boundary in size equivalent to a normal hard drive. Why stop at 32bits addressing when 48 probably doesn't make much of a difference (the 16 extra will be all zero for a while after all, close to no cost on the card and negligible on the controller) and would match (s)ata that way with its far more future-proof 128PB limit.
Flash cards seem to move as fast as HDDs, they only started later.
OG.
Curious... (Score:5, Insightful)
If this standard were promulagated in 1995 or something, when 2TB hard drives were basically science fiction, and 2TB solid state drives not the size of entire rooms and costing the GDP of one of the smaller European nations were also basically science fiction, I could understand a 2TB limit(just as the old-school sub-48-bit-LBA HDD size limits are annoying but understandable in context). However, you can buy 1TB SSDs right now. They are not cheap; but they cost less than a decent car. 2TB devices that are basically the PCBs of the 1TB devices with a cheap RAID chip in there somewhere are also in existence. If you are developing a new standard, one that completely changes the electrical substrate and will thus never be backwards compatible(unlike earlier CF standards bumps, which, with the exception of 5v/3.3v changed nothing on the physical side), why would you set a limit that will probably be exceeded in the lab inside two years, and available to the more-money-than-sense crowd in 5? Are the few extra bits that would take you from 2TB to a zillion Petabytes so expensive?) It wouldn't be cheap; but you could(using bare dice and clever stacking and the case as a heat sink) get roughly 1TB worth of flash silicon, plus a controller of some kind, into the size constraints of a CF card right now. Doubling that can't be too far away, unless we hit some nasty wall, and interconnect standards have a way of sticking around for years. Why hobble this one?
Re:/. attitude (Score:2, Insightful)
Wait, did you just assume he was arguing against a new specification?
He's pointing out the headline states one thing and the summary states another. When I saw the headline, and did not see anything about specification, I assumed the headline was literal. Upon reading the summary, I read something completely different but related.
Re:Only 2T ? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Specification (Score:5, Insightful)
What they're doing is announcing passenger car tires that are specified to handle 400 MPH, which no passenger car can currently do.
Actually, what they're doing is announcing a standardized shape, fittings, and labelling system for passenger car tires -- so that you'll be able to recognize one that could go 400 MPH if some manufacturer gets around to designing such a tire. Neither car nor tire actually exist yet.